Favoritos de crab_baguette

See also https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/201340250
I discovered this morning that there was not just 1 orchid mantis on the shrub but 3... including 1 very small.
So I create one observation per specimen...

Here we have a soldier of Promirotermes, a beautiful and very peculiar genus of soil-feeding Termitinae with esile and agile soldiers with symmetrical snapping mandibles, capable of delivering powerful blows to their enemies. Cute!

Note that the date has been rounded and might be off by a few days at most.

Here we have some Thoracotermes macrothorax (apparently a genus and species still missing from Inat since it does not let me add its name in the title), a large and beautiful soil-feeding termite of the Cubitermitinae family. This genus and species are named after the highly expanded pronotum of the soldiers, which along their conspicuous size and robust build make them rather impressive critters! In the first pic you can see soldiers and workers, in the second there is also a presoldier (the white individual on the bottom left) and the third shows a majestic mature mound of the species.

Note: the date is rounded up, and may be inaccurate by a few days at most.

Here we have one of the highlights of my recent trip to Camerun: Macrotermes amplus! This is a very large, darkly colored, open-foraging fungus growing termite with impressive major soldiers and peculiar, agile minor soldiers. In the first pic you can see a couple of the formers (being rather unhappy at the petri dish containing them), in the second two of the latters and in the third a minor and a major stand side by side to illustrate their impressive bimorphism.

These were found nesting in a scrubland savanna under the shade of a patch of particularly dense trees, with an epigeal nest comprised of several tiny mounds distributed over an area of multiple square meters rather than a singular large mound.

Note: the date has been rounded up, and might be inaccurate by a few days at most.